Initially I had presumed (given his areas of expertise and his prior publications including a text with the same publisher) that the author of the above mentioned book was at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá / Universidad de los Andes. After a brief email exchange, it turns out (surprisingly to me) that, in fact, I was wrong. The serendipitous benefit is that the “wrong” Viswanathan Arunachalam has some excellent publications which are certainly worth looking into in the areas of probability, mathematics, bioinformatics, and mathematical biology. I’ve also taken a brief look at his text Introduction to Probability and Stochastic Processes with Applications (Wiley, 2012) and can recommend it for those who are just starting out in probability.

The original mistaken portion of the original blog post appears below. My apologies again for the mistake.

Assuming he’s the author (based on his academic website which doesn’t mention the book yet) Dr. Viswanathan Arunachalam is a mathematician by trade. Not having been aware of his work previously, I’m excited to delve into a bit of it as most researchers working in the area seem to be attacking these problems from the viewpoint of engineers, biophysicists, or biologists. He is one of the first people I’m aware of coming at this from a pure mathematics standpoint. I’ll try to post up some of his papers within the Mendeley group for ITBio shortly.

Viswanathan Arunachalam